[Aindreas Gallagher]"how limited do you find it as a straight cutter without the GPU hack? will that HD ProRes and C300 play together ok without it? (as in full res 1080p say?)

I forgot to ask - what's your system?"

HD prores/DNxHD footage works great in full quality realtime even with a couple of effects on it. There's the red bar but you don't have to render. The Mac is the same as you were thinking of buying except this one has 16 gigs of RAM, a SSD for the system drive and the Pegasus RAID.